Almost exactly this time last year, I was sitting on the top deck of the Oxford Tube travelling to spend Christmas with my family, not enjoying tuneless Christmas carols from the front seat. This year, I am happy to report, there is less singing on the top deck of the Oxford Tube, but still free wifi. Happy Christmas.

One of my pet hates is supposed lefties bemoaning the end of social mobility under New Labour. Adrian has written the post I wanted to on this. Excuse me for wanting the strong safety net and no-one bumping along the bottom.

Grant Shapps (a likeable chap) has read Mr Cameron’s script. As the housing spokesperson, he’s cross about homelessness, specifically about the damage that housing insecurity and temporary housing does to children. He’s not wrong to be outraged, but don’t you just wish that the top Tories would talk to the middling Tories, like Cllr Alison Latham and Cllr David Hopkins, about getting on board with the new cuddly Cameroonies? Then they could stick to the script, not embarrassing their party with chatter about how building new houses would make Milton Keynes a destination for every housing benefit claimant in the country, and whitter about how desperately-needed new homes would be the sink estates of tomorrow.

In 1999, a prime minister not noted for bold visionary statements made a visionary statement. In the Beveridge Lecture, delivered on 18 March 1999, Tony Blair committed his government to abolishing child poverty within 20 years.

For the first few years, he did pretty well (with a bit of help from his Chancellor). Knowing it would take a massive boost to the income of the poorest families, he made it happen through tax credits. And it worked for several years, with the campaigning children’s charities finally getting together to speak with one voice on the issue and call out for more, and faster. But by the time 2005’s figures were published, it was clear that we were off-track, and the quarter-way target was missed.

So, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation asked one of their bright people to sit down and work out what it would take to even get as far as halfway, given that the good start was faltering. The answer, published as time was getting shorter in mid-2006, was that halving child poverty by 2010 would take about £4 billion more than currently planned to be spent on tax credits and benefits. (That’s 0.3% of GDP; oh, and far from being an ongoing commitment, halving child poverty is a gift that goes on giving as the not-poor children do better in school, are healthier and happier, and cost less in crisis and second-chance services later on.)

In the meantime, Unicef publish a report comparing the outcomes of British children with those elsewhere in the world, and the UK and by extension the government get pilloried. No matter that some of the statistics were out-of-date, no matter that giving equal weight to whether a child feels good about itself, important though that is, with whether they have enough to eat is a bit odd; still the government gets a kicking. The Tories get in on the act, signing up to the aspiration, even if they have no plans for getting there that actually would put them on the right page of the map.

So: there’s a government with a totemic pledge, which they were doing quite well on; no shortage of public outrage about how unhappy our kids are; a robust piece of research letting them know how to do it; enough cross-party cover to get on with it.

And given all this, what’s in that nice Mr Balls’ Children’s Plan? Lots of cool stuff. Youth clubs, play areas, nurseries, a new primary curriculum. Lovely. But not a sniff of the money we need. Cos all the back-to-work schemes in the world, all the things-to-do and mentors and climbing frames don’t get us to a 50% drop in child poverty by 2010. We need £4 billion, spent on tax credits and benefits. You promised, Mr Brown.

As usual, nothing I write here represents the views of any person or organisation other than myself.

John Redwood (via Ben Brogan):

…none of us want men to rape women, but there is a difference between a man using unreasonable force to assault a woman on the street, and a disagreement between two lovers over whether there was consent on one particular occasion when the two were spending an evening or night together.

Perhaps I’ve misunderstood, but since when has forcing a woman to have sex against her will been just a disagreement?

Entertaining saga in the Guardian this week. First, the report that Jodie Foster finally came out, thanking her female partner at an awards ceremony. Then, the inevitable letter, bemoaning that this was an action worthy of mention, and stating, falsely in my experience, that straight people do not assume everyone else is heterosexual. Finally, the Guardian-reading (dare I say sensibly-shod?) lesbian contingent rounded on the naysayer in Saturday’s Guardian. Fantastic fun. And serious too - forgive me for being so unhip as to be pleased.